Jodie Sinclair’s insider knowledge of the pain inmate families suffer and the casual cruelty in the U.S. justice system is based on 25 years as a reporter, author, and prisoner’s wife.
She has an MS in Journalism (Columbia University 1985). In 2020, The New York Daily News said her newly released memoir was written with an “astute journalist’s eye for detail” about the corruption and cruelty she encountered in Louisiana's penal system.
She is the sole author of a nationally published book "Love Behind Bars: The True Story of An American Prisoner's Wife" released in 2020 and co-author of two books “A Life In The Balance: The Billy Wayne Sinclair Story,” published in 2000 and “The Death Penalty: An Indictment by a Death Row Survivor” released in 2009.
”Love Behind Bars: The True Story of An American Prisoner’s Wife” chronicles the illegal actions of prosecutors, politicians, and penal authorities to keep her husband behind bars for life after the attempt to have him executed failed. He was a former death row inmate and a national award-winning co-editor of The Angolite, an uncensored prison magazine, when they met at Angola in 1981. They married a year later.
The New York Times called “Balance” “a numbing tale of crime, punishment and redemption.” Sister Helen Prejean’s Foreword in the second book says it is a “searing condemnation” of the death penalty.
Sub-specialties:
Death Penalty – Jodie Sinclair is a daily consumer of national and local news about prisons and related criminal justice issues. She is a former TV news reporter who witnessed an execution and later co-authored a book condemning the death penalty. Sister Helen Prejean, the author of “Dead Man Walking,” wrote the Foreword for that book. Sister Helen’s “personal entreaties to two popes helped to shape Catholic opposition to the death penalty.” The book covers the executions of innocents and the guilty, providing specific details about the methods used to kill them and botched executions that caused extreme suffering.
Victims’ Rights –Victims seeking justice for murdered loved ones are cheated when racism and politics intervene in criminal cases. The selective enforcement that singles out a prisoner for more severe treatment than others charged with the same crime, destroys faith for all Americans in equal justice under the law.
Prison Corruption – Jodie Sinclair knows the U.S. criminal justice system is based on revenge, not rehabilitation. Current press account verify that. For 25 years, she fought to free a husband locked down more than once for no apparent reason, who endured a gas attack, was forced to wear a stun belt that could deliver 50,000 volts of electricity on a trip to court after the corrections department told the press it was no longer using the device. When she participated in a 2003 Discovery Channel documentary about prison marriages, her visiting privileges were revoked for weeks.
Political corruption - Jodie Sinclair helped her inmate husband - a jail house lawyer and award-winning co-editor of a prison magazine, - expose corruption and political interference in the Corrections Department in Louisiana. She wore a wire for the FBI to gather evidence in a pardons-for-sale scam he exposed. Her husband later exposed the illicit relationship between a pedophile priest, the Chief Judge of the Fifth Circuit of Appeals, and the Secretary of Louisiana’s Corrections Department.
